“The Lottery”

A new documentary film called “The Lottery” that takes on the topic of charter schools, is getting cheers and jeers from critics and filmgoers. Variety called it “advocacy to the point of propaganda” that creates a “virtual PSA for charter schools and New York’s celebrated Harlem Success Academy in particular.”

The film focuses on founder/CEO Eva Moskowitz who has to battle with stupidity, corruption and practically has “to apologize to the New York City Council for being a white woman living in Harlem.”

Madeline Sackler, a 27-year-old filmmaker, tells the story of four families dealing with the lottery experience at Harlem Success. The film goes inside “the city’s entrenched bureaucracy, portrayed as the Frankenstein monster of collective bargaining, and discovers that two factors predominate: the teachers’ union and race.”

“The Lottery” discloses some disturbing facts: “58 percent of black children in the fourth grade are illiterate,” and “only 10 out of 55,000 tenured teachers were fired” in 2008, because “firing a bad teacher ends up costing the city $250,000.”

Given these unsavory conditions, it’s no wonder that when a gem called the Harlem Success Academies appeared on the horizon, it attracted legions of supporters. The school currently has 3,000 applicants for the 475 spaces available.

When Madeline Sackler attended the lottery, she was astounded to find thousands of parents were there, and made a decision to begin filming immediately. As a non-political person, she was gradually drawn into the “turf wars about the future of public education.”

At an anti-charter-school protest that threatened the entrenched powers-that-be, Sackler told the Wall Street Journal she discovered that the two parents present were members of ACORN, and that the “United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn  . . . half a million dollars for the year.”

Myths were quickly propagated by unions and politicians, claiming that charters were divisive, and a “tool for gentrification.” But Sackler noted that “this canard only holds up if you think uniforms and longer school days are a sign of cultural imperialism.”

“Harlem Success gets superior results with the same or slightly bigger class sizes and less state money per pupil,” Sackler said. “In 2009, 95 percent of third graders passed the state’s English Language Arts exam” compared to 51 percent in the public school.  “That same year, Harlem Success was No. 1 in math out of 3,500 public schools in New York State.”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.